Zarena Aslami. The Dream Life of Citizens: Late Victorian Novels and the Fantasy of the State. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. ISBN: 978-0-8232-4199-6. Price: US$55.00

In a characteristically caustic passage in George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893), an anecdote about a man whose engagement lasted seventeen years while he struggled for the economic security to marry leads to some high-spirited, sharp-edged banter between would-be lovers Everard Barfoot and Rhoda Nunn. To Everard’s proposal that after ten years’ constancy on the part of a betrothed couple, “the State ought to make provision for the man in some way, according to his social standing,” Rhoda replies that the institution of marriage might be strengthened if the State required all engagements to last at least ten years. Further elaborations on the fantasy follow: aspirants to marriage must pass a state-mandated examination first, while also providing proof that they earn their living “by work that the State recognizes.” Government certification of competence as a prerequisite to marriage: the idea that the State might intervene to protect its citizens from their self-destructive erotic impulses—or even their innocence—is presented as just plausible enough to be unsettling. Zarena Aslami identifies this exchange between Everard and Rhoda as her starting point for The Dream Life of Citizens. At such moments, she notes, a personified State becomes an actor in dramas both public and private. According to Aslami, this habit of mind (which of course is still familiar today) permeated late Victorian Britain. That it did is unsurprising, given not just the rapid growth of government and the proliferation of public services during this period but also the range and diversity of new regulations designed to protect and enhance the well-being of citizens. As a result, “the state was now involved in life processes from birth to death and was articulating the rationality for such practices as the ethical defense of the overall health of the population” (10). Aslami’s own syntax here underscores how natural it is to cast the state as an agent equipped with intentions and capable of performing actions and of articulating rationales for them. It is instructive to contrast this manner of imagining the state with our usual ways of imagining what Aslami calls the state’s more “glamorous,” more “sentimentally charged” other, the nation (1). While “the nation” can lend itself to personification, it retains the idea of a collectivity of the separate individuals comprising it. We “belong to” a nation, but we invariably think of the state as an entity distinct from ourselves. One’s relationship to the state is thus conceived in terms of self and other. As Aslami persuasively argues, the state is thus available as a locus for fantasy. While a strong tradition of scholarship stemming from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (Verso, 1983) has taught us how to parse the cultural work done by fantasies of the nation, relatively little attention has been given to the nature and consequences of state-inspired fantasy. The Dream Life of Citizens seeks to remedy that situation. Aslami pursues two entwined lines of inquiry. The first has to do with the differing articulations in the period of the fantasy that “the state was not only coherent, knowable, and personified, but also heroic and endowed with the capacity to transform people’s lives” (4). The second takes up what Aslami argues is a new form of subjectivity—a “statified” subjectivity (11)—which emerges largely as a result of the operation of this fantasy. After an introductory overview, the book’s arguments unfold through close analyses of a handful of representative late Victorian novels: Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883), G. A. Henty’s For Name and Fame (1886), Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887), Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1887), Gissing’s The Odd …